The Atlas of Missing Feelings

Every language draws the map of feeling differently. English names roughly three hundred emotions; other tongues have named feelings English has never noticed. The Portuguese saudade, a longing for something lost that may never return. The Japanese mono no aware, the gentle sadness of things passing. These are not translations waiting to happen. They are coordinates on the emotional landscape that English simply does not visit.

This project is an attempt to make that landscape visible. On the wheel, six core emotions sit at the centre, after Gloria Willcox's clinical model; around them, their English subtleties; around those, an outer ring of words gathered from across the world's languages, each placed near the feeling it most closely neighbours. On the grid, those same words are scattered across two axes of energy and pleasantness, so you can find a feeling by how it sits in the body rather than what it sits beside. Research suggests that naming a feeling more precisely is not merely describing it, but expanding what you are capable of feeling.